Google's Plan to Steal the Election Audience

NBC, CBS, ABC: Watch out, Google has you in its sights. If the company has its way, viewers looking to follow the U.S. elections won't tune in to network and cable news outlets - they'll log on to YouTube.

To achieve this, the company launched the YouTube Election Hub, a multi-sourced video channel designed to aggregate coverage and commentary from across media outlets old and new. Alongside clips from the likes of ABC News, Al Jazeera, Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed is a curated feed of videos from other sources. YouTube will also be streaming debates and other important election-related events live from this landing page. 

In 2008, Net-centric viewers could stream the presidential debates from a laptop hooked up to one's TV, but not in a particularly elegant fashion. This year, debates and other key events will all be housed on YouTube's new politics channel, which can be accessed from the browser, AirPlayed to an Apple TV or viewed on any of the native YouTube apps for Boxee, Apple TV or Roku. For cord-cutting Americans who just jumped through hoops to watch the Summer Olympics, the election season should be relatively painless. 

But Google's plan promises to be much more than that: It may be a glimpse of the post-television future. Funneling everything onto one page potentially will give viewers a 360-degree view of November's elections, candidates and issues. By collecting a range of sources and perspectives in a single hub on a very popular site, YouTube will break down the institutional and ideological barriers have have historically existed between outlets. 

It sounds Quixotic, but if anyone can beat the networks at their own game, it's the Google/YouTube colossus. By virtue of its size and relationships with content owners, YouTube stands uniquely positioned to make a major impact. Television is still very much dominant, to be sure. But YouTube has been aggressively repositioning itself to compete more directly with traditional TV, and it has already eclipsed radio as a source of free music among U.S. teens. Depending on how viewers react, the elections may end up being a referendum not only on the state of union, but on the future of television.

Why Apple's iCloud Doesn't Just Work

'It just works,' the Apple marketing slogan goes. But for the syncing features in iCloud, that promise has proven too good to be true. On Thursday, the first iOS app launched that eschews iCloud in favor of a new third-party service called Simperium. If you use an iPhone or iPad, you'll want to know why.

iCloud is not a discrete thing. It's actually an ad hoc bundle of different syncing technologies, and they're just buggy enough to be unsettling to users. We take Apple at its word that 'it just works,' but every so often, an app that syncs with iCloud takes five or ten painful seconds to open. This only has to happen once in a hundred times to shake our faith in the system.

Our instinct is to blame the app when it's actually iCloud's fault. Greg Pierce, the developer at Agile Tortoise released Drafts 2.0 and Drafts for iPad Thursday, and he decided to avoid this problem.

Drafts (which I love) is the quickest way to jot anything down on the iPhone, and now it syncs to the iPad version. But rather than take the heat for iCloud's problems, Pierce decided to make Drafts the first app to sync via third-party provider Simperium.

Building Drafts 2.0

'Drafts is designed around speed and simplicity,' Pierce says, 'so I knew the right sync solution would have to be fast and simple.'

Dropbox is a proven option for syncing whole documents, but that's not how Drafts works. Drafts saves all your notes in one database, which makes the app faster, but Dropbox sync would be much slower than a solution that can just sync little changes to the one big database.

So Pierce initially considered iCloud's Core Data syncing, which is designed for exactly this. 'Many of the initial setup steps were deceptively easy,' Pierce says, 'but as I dug deeper into providing a complete implementation, it became clear to me that I was going to find many rabbit to chase.'

The first problem was speed, which is pretty much the selling point for Drafts. iCloud sometimes slows an app's launch to a crawl, a deal-breaker for Drafts.

The other problem Pierce found with iCloud was more philosophical. iCloud syncing is restricted to apps sold within Apple's App Stores. As of now, there's no way for Web-based apps to sync with iCloud, nor for Mac apps sold outside the App Store or on other platforms. While Pierce has no specific plans for Drafts to sync more widely, he wanted to give himself the flexibility to build it later.

So when you first launch Drafts 2.0 on your phone or Drafts on your iPad, you'll be prompted to sign up for Simperium if you want syncing features. All you need is an email address and a password, and you're likely to see Simperium in more apps in the near future.

What The Heck Is A Simperium?

Simperium is actually the in-house syncing service for the beloved note-taking app Simplenote, but the company has decided to abstract it and make it available for other developers to implement.

'You can think of Simperium as a post-PC circulatory system for data,' co-founder Mike Johnson says. It's built to speak to all kinds of devices and services and be easy to implement. 'The result is that developers can use Simperium like a Lego brick,' snapping together different applications and devices with data that fits, allowing 'pretty much any feature where data needs to move quickly and reliably from one place to another.'

Why Is Sync So Hard?

The short answer for why syncing doesn't 'just work' is that conflicts in the data always pop up. 'Conflicts happen a lot more often than many developers realize, especially at scale,' Johnson says. 'The symptoms are duplications, corruption, or in the worst case, outright data loss, all of which are unacceptable.'

iCloud handles the headache of resolving conflicts, but it does so at great cost, such as preventing the app from loading while it sorts things out. 'It pains us to see apps, some of them very prominent, with bad syncing, or no offline support, or interfaces that block the user while waiting for network data,' says Johnson. 'These are inexcusable user experience blunders.'

Sync was one of Pierce's most requested features for Drafts after it launched on the iPhone. It sure is convenient for our data to sync everywhere. But the implementation of that magic is much more delicate than meets the eye. Pierce found a solution that works, and if you check out the new Drafts, it surely won't be the last time an app asks you to log into Simperium.

Top 10 Windows 8 Features #4: Windows To Go

The basic premise of Windows To Go sounds like it escaped from an alternate universe: Now you can take Windows home with you from work, and run it on your living room PC. "That's crazy," you might respond, "it's already on my living room PC!" But this is Windows 8, which is so, so different that the ability to create take-home, bootable OS instances on a thumb drive actually makes sense in a number of important ways. Ironically, though, Windows To Go isn't really about Windows 8 at all. It's about the benefits of getting Windows into a space that used to be too tight for it to fit - and also an experimental, bottom-up approach to implementing tighter network security.

Easily the biggest threat to businesses' network security has come from their employees' ability to connect their PCs to corporate networks, both directly and remotely. Most unwanted activity derives from the outside, which is partly why typical security models adopt the 'fortress mentality' ­­' a scheme which is largely incompatible with openness of cloud computing. Similarly, the trend toward Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to work was intended to save on capital expenditures, but somne companies end up spending the savings on network maintenance: remediating all the malware and other unwanted content that employees bring with them.

So Windows To Go is an experiment in what Microsoft calls an 'alternative workplace scenario.'

The Open, Closed System

Here's the basic premise: Businesses need to be able to manage the workspaces on which their applications are being used, but employees may not want their personal computers managed for them by their bosses. Borrowing an idea from virtualization, Windows To Go creates an environment that can be managed separately from the personal environment, letting employees lend businesses the use of their processors without signing over the deed to their computers. Employees use the business workspace while the Windows To Go thumb drive is plugged in and operating. Once it's removed, the computer resumes being personal again.

The Windows To Go thumb drive is something admins will have to prepare themselves; it's not a device you buy from Microsoft. Back in 2006, Microsoft premiered a concept called Windows Image Manager (WIM) which is a system for preparing installations of Windows that already include both the policies and the software (including third-party) that businesses prescribe, so that it can be painted onto multiple users' systems in one step like wallpaper.  With the new Windows Server 2013, admins can use this same WIM to paint Windows 8 Enterprise images onto thumb drives. So a Windows To Go image is a copy of Windows 8 that's licensed to the business, not the employee. The worker can use it at work or at home, and it contains either the applications or access to the applications that the admin directly manages. And even if a worker does take her own PC to work with her, she can use the Windows To Go image during work hours separately from the (presumably licensed) operating system installed on that PC.

To pull this off, Windows To Go makes some very significant tradeoffs, some of which will render the whole idea a non-starter for some businesses and users.  The biggest sacrifice is that the user's local hard disk is inaccessible from the Windows To Go environment. If there is any single way to absolutely ensure that the Windows To Go workspace doesn't get infected by downloaded malware, it's completely annihilating access to the local hard drive.

So where are you supposed to store documents, you may ask? A PC with Windows To Go can access the storage devices of systems in its local network.  Microsoft provided me with a Windows To Go drive using the last Windows 8 Release Preview for my own experiments. I have several PCs in my peer-to-peer office network, some with Windows 7, others with the Windows 8 Release to Manufactuing (RTM) version. Ironically, I had no trouble sharing documents with the Windows 7-based machines; the Windows 8 devices had more difficulty, in some cases with the whole notion of password-protected sharing.

In a test involving three PCs (one Windows 7, one Windows 8 RTM with OS provided by Microsoft, and the third Windows To Go), the Windows To Go machine appeared to kick the Windows 8 RTM machine out of the homegroup (more about that concept in a moment). While the Windows To Go machine was booted, the homegroup password created earlier by the Windows 7 machine was considered invalid. But once the Windows To Go machine was powered off, the same password was accepted.

It's enough that admins have to deal with networking issues between their own PCs, without having to introduce a truckload of new issues with their colleagues' PCs. Besides all that, assuming networking connections are not a problem, not everyone will have the luxury of more than one PC at home.

Given all that, the preferred response to the question of where you store your documents is, 'In the cloud' ' specifically Microsoft's own SkyDrive. After all, Microsoft has always tried to leverage its strength in one platform to promote another. 

An Interesting Experiment

Windows To Go is most definitely an experiment (though not a terribly costly one for Microsoft) to see whether businesses have any influence over what operating system gets used at home. If admins like the idea of a controllable business environment that isn't a virtual machine, that's administrable through System Center or other common tools, and that's guaranteed to be disconnected from the key delivery source for malware in businesses, they might just get employees to swallow it like candy. In turn, those employees get the new Windows 8 and probably Office 2013, plus a channel for syncing documents.

Here is where the enticement may start to fall apart, for both parties: The reason a consumer would want to try Windows 8 is to play with all its cool features, including the Windows RT apps installable from the new Windows Store. But such apps would have to be installed on the Windows To Go device, not on the PC. It's doubtful that admins would permit users to do this.

For companies, the whole point of administrator control of business workspaces is to have control over the Desktop. Administering the Desktop, by definition, is taken to mean keeping it stable. But the Windows 8 Start Screen, which sublimates the old Desktop, is as unstable as NBC's fall schedule. By design, it's a bubbling cauldron of change, intended more to be cultivated like a garden than administered like a bookcase. Typical company manuals instructions like, 'To launch the application, double-click on the icon in the second column of the fourth row,' are pointless for the Start Screen, whose tiles for Office apps can literally float off the screen if the user bookmarks enough pages in Internet Explorer.

Security & Reliability Are Still Issues

Believe it or not, there's also the issue of security ­­' which was supposedly the whole point of Windows To Go's existence. Because the operating system is stored on a thumb drive ' an easily copyable unit of memory ' it cannot be considered a trusted device by any security system that relies on a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for authentication.  

For some business networks, that's the ballgame; if you can't log on from a system that doesn't have TPM, forget it. What's more, Microsoft's own BitLocker ' which encrypts and protects content stored on thumb drives and other removable storage ­­' prefers the presence of a TPM for authenticating its encryption keys. You can go without it, but in a TPM's absence, Windows To Go's alternative is the use of something called a 'secure password,' which these days ranks up there with 'safe school' and 'affordable health insurance.'

The final leg to stand on is reliability, and Windows To Go teeters here as well. A big part of Windows 8's value proposition is synchronization, which takes place through what's now called the Microsoft Account. When you log onto a new Windows 8 machine using an existing Account, many of the settings from the previous machine (your avatar, choice of colors, Desktop wallpaper among them) carry over. For syncing to happen reliably, each Windows 8 machine must be registered with Microsoft as 'trusted.'

That's a tall order for a device that isn't really a machine at all. If you tell Microsoft to 'trust' a Windows To Go instance as though it were a machine, and anyone were to copy that thumb drive, suddenly you've cloned the machine. Which one does Microsoft trust now? What's the value of a trusted machine if any one of them may not actually be a machine, or that one could be more original than the other?

The quandary doesn't end there. After having Microsoft officially 'trust' the 'machine' it loaned me, I had difficulties getting Windows To Go join the homegroup. On two occasions, after I shut down the laptop running Windows To Go, the fact that the machine with my Account wasn't in a homegroup synced with the Windows 8 RTM tablet that was, subsequently kicked it out of the homegroup and forced me to retrain it to recognize my own network.  

You have to ask whose genius idea was it to synchronize a setting stating explicitly the lack of connectivity, over a machine that must obviously be connected in order to sync in the first place?

Why Windows To Go Matters

It's the type of ridiculousness - with a capital 'M' - that I've gotten all too used to over the decades. And yet I rank Windows To Go #4 on my Top 10 list of Windows 8 features. Am I an 'oxy-moron?'

Here's my thinking: One of Microsoft's distinguishing features has been that it rarely quits anything after the first try. There is clearly something to the idea of giving employees a safe workspace they can hold in their hands. Windows 7 tried separating workspaces virtually with the homegroup concept ' a way of separating home policies from work policies, so that unwanted content in one does not infect the other. Homegroups typically work well (at least in Windows 7-only scenarios), but because homegroups and workgroups share local hard drives, the concept is not perfect. And delivering virtual workspaces as virtual machines doesn't change this fact.

If you could run an entire workspace without the need of the local hard drive, and without impacting performance, you could improve business network security tremendously. This is why Windows To Go is such a big deal: It could lead, eventually, to huge savings for business. User Account Control was a big deal for Vista too, and as you'll recall, Microsoft didn't get it right the first time or the second time. But the third time was the charm and I look forward to a similar progression for Windows To Go.

See All of the Windows Top 10 Windows 8 Features

No. 10: Refresh and Reset

No. 9: File History

No. 8: Storage Spaces

No. 7: Client-side Hyper-V

No. 6: Secure Boot

No. 5: Live Performance and Reliability Charts

 

 

Is Apple Supplier Foxconn Finally Giving Its Workers a Fair Shake?

Apple and its factory partner, Foxconn, have made great strides in bringing Foxconn's labor conditions into compliance with local laws, the Fair Labor Association said Tuesday. Not surprisingly, independent labor rights monitoring organizations remain skeptical that real progress has been made.

In a status report made public on Tuesday, the FLA reported that all of the 195 remedial actions that Foxconn had agreed to complete to come into compliance had been accomplished. More significantly, 89 action items were completed ahead of their deadlines, with another 76 due to be completed by the end of July 2013.

Not Really Made by Apple

Although products like the iPod and iPad bear Apple's logo, their assembly and production are carried out by a network of factories across Asia and Taiwan. There, wages are a fraction of that of the United States, and working conditions aren't as strictly regulated. But the cost savings are also passed along, resulting in higher profits for the manufacturer and lower price tags for consumers.

For several years, Apple has performed health and safety audits of those factories, provided reports of whether or not those suppliers conform to local labor laws - a practice that other companies do not emulate, at least publicly. Apple itself found that in many cases, suppliers failed to comply with Apple's own code of conduct: just 38% of its suppliers met Apple's mandated limits of 60 hours worked per week, for example.

In January, a firestorm of controversy erupted when The New York Times began publishing a series of investigative stories on working conditions within Foxconn, the largest supplier to Apple and many other top companies. Following that criticism about the working conditions at Foxconn, including conditions that led to an explosion at one facility, Apple agreed to allow the FLA to conduct a thorough investigation of those suppliers, beginning with three factories at Guanlan, Longhua, and Chengdou in China.

4 Areas for Improvement

The FLA identified four main categories of remedial actions that Foxconn needed to undertake:

1. Reducing working hours
2. Improving health and safety
3. Improving employee relations
4. Supplying overtime pay and necessary worker insurance.

In its report, the FLA said that Foxconn is moving ahead:

'Our verification shows that the necessary changes, including immediate health and safety measures, have been made. We are satisfied that Apple has done its due diligence thus far to hold Foxconn accountable for complying with the action plan, including the commitment to reform its internship program,' said Auret van Heerden, president and chief executive of the Fair Labor Association, in a statement. 'When we finished our initial investigation in March, Foxconn promised to address concerns with its internship program by ensuring that student interns do not work overtime, their work has a more direct connection to their field of study, and they understand that they are free to terminate the internship if and when they wish.'

FLA representatives did not return calls for comment.

Documents posted to the FLA website indicate that Foxconn addressed many of the required changes via new policies issued in May or June.

Doubts Remain

But Scott Nova, executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, which monitors worker conditions in factories overseas, said that it is unlikely that Foxconn could have solved its institutional problems in so short a time.

'The FLA's position, as we understand it, is that it's fine for Foxconn to continue violating overtime labor laws if they promise to clean it up by some time next year,' Nova told ReadWriteWeb. 'And we don't think that's reasonable. Apple and Foxconn should obey the law, now.'

Nova also said that the reforms proposed by the FLA omit 'the long track record of harsh, psychologically abusive management practices at the factories. There are no meaningful recommendations in that regard, and very likely no progress.' Nova also said he also doubted that allowing the workers the freedom to associate, form worker groups or unions and collectively bargain would occur in any meaningful sense.

'It's hard not to be skeptical of a report that says that Foxconn has hit every single one of its commitments and done so ahead of schedule,' Nova said. 'That is a radical departure of a decade-long track record at Foxconn.'

Looking Beyond Foxconn

Just as important, these issue stretch far beyond Foxconn. In a report issued in late July, China Labor Watch claimed that labor violations are not only still rampant at Foxconn, but also at other companies in Apple's supply chain. That report specifically called out Ri Teng, a subsidiary of Pegatron, where an explosion injured several employees in December 2011.

On average, Ri Teng workers are on the job nearly 12 hours a day, compared to 10 hours a day at the Foxconn factory, the report found. The Ri Teng workers get only about one day of rest each month. There, the average hourly wage is 8.2 RMB or $1.30, China Labor Watch said, versus the average Foxconn hourly wage of 10.2 RMB or $1.62.

So while progress may be occuring, it's unlikely that the controversy will go away anytime soon.

 

Generic factory image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Conflict Minerals In Your Phone Could Spur E-Recycling But Likely More Conflict

Coltan, Democratic Republic of the Congo

While blood diamonds have been the subject of movies and have received great attention, a far lesser known issue remains ' one of conflict minerals, the most common of which include cassiterite, wolframite and coltan as well as the ever lustrous gold. 

Much of these minerals are extracted in eastern providences of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with various factions including both government forces and rebel factions looking to make a profit from these minerals, which are essential in the manufacturer of many high-tech gizmos and gadgets.

Part of the problem is that many of these minerals are necessary for the electronic components while the other part of the problem is that these are found in rather remote areas. 

"Most of the assumed supply is in China," said Glen Hiemstra,  futurist and author of  "Turning the Future into Revenue: What Businesses and Individuals Need to Know to Shape Their Future."  "There are two sites in the U.S. but one has been considered uneconomic, which is surprising given the need, and the other in Idaho has been undeveloped for environmental reasons."

As with blood diamonds, efforts have made to curtail the market for conflict minerals ' at least in theory. In 2010 the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was supposed to create a global transparency standard to help break the link between natural resources and conflict and corruption. 

Section 1502 of Dodd-Frank even requires U.S. listed companies using tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold from DRC or neighboring countries to carry out checks on their supply chain, and to disclose annually to the SEC whether their minerals purchases have benefited abusive armed groups. 

Yet the trade continues, and according to the Enough Project, which recently issued its second annual company rankings report, "Taking Conflict Out of Consumer Gadgets: Company Rankings on Conflict Minerals 2012," efforts have improved but some companies are still lagging behind. 

While Intel, HP and Apple have reportedly established conflict mineral programs, video game maker Nintendo found itself at the bottom of the list and has reportedly made no efforts to trace or audit its supply chain.

"Companies need to hold a light to their supply chains and sweep the floors to get rid of the dirt," said Sasha Lezhnev, Enough Project senior policy analyst and co-author of the report. "Firms should trace and audit their supply chains to see who exactly their smelters are, and if they are using only conflict free smelters. They also should help develop a clean minerals trade in Congo, after years of turning a blind eye to their purchases."

The problem will likely only increase as demand for consumer electronics increases world-wide, especially as China has begun to set limits on the exportation of its rare earth minerals, thus increasing the demand for minerals in conflict zones.

"Smuggling is already increasing because of increased prices for tantalum and gold, so companies need to be extra vigilant in the next months to make sure that the audits are even more thorough than before," added Lezhnev. "The conflict minerals mafia won't go down without a fight."

But could greater efforts at recycling of used consumer electronics to reclaim the conflict minerals help solve this problem while also helping ease the ever-increasing amounts of e-waste that continue to pile up as consumers rush to buy the next big thing?

This would not be without its own new set of problems. While the SEC considers minerals obtained from recycled or scrap source to be DRC conflict free, the SEC does not plan to define what is recycled or scrap material ' and companies are left their to establish their own definition, with so-called "supporting explanations." 

"It is possible but unclear, as recycling could also be a loophole for conflict minerals to seep in," said Lezhnev.

The future is thus not so clear on how this might be resolved, but recycling will likely be one possibility.

"It seems like three alternate paths will emerge," said Hiemstra, who noted that one could be a greater emphasis on recycling, a search for substitute materials or just as likely, "increased conflict over rare earth access in (places such as) Africa."

"Given the need, I expect all three scenarios to emerge simultaneously," he admitted, "along with a more dedicated search for, and development of new sources."

For those in the conflict zone the search may not come soon enough. 

Photo by nikkiwhaites.

Facebook Has Been Hacked. What Will You Do?

This week's apparent hacking of Facebook accounts is a good reminder that all of us are vulnerable to account theft. Here are the steps to take if you think your Facebook account has been hacked.

We're still waiting to hear back from Facebook about the attack we reported yesterday, but the ongoing discussion in Facebook's Help Center indicates that it's related to a syncing issue involving the contacts in some mobile phones. If you have been hit by the current attack, turn off the sync-contacts function on your mobile Facebook app. We'll update our earlier post as soon as we get confirmation from Facebook.

In the meantime, here are basic steps you should take whenever you think your account has been hacked.

Change Your Password

This should be obvious. if someone or something has access to your account, end it by changing your Facebook password.

Think of password changes like drug screenings at work: You should do it on a regular basis and after there's been an accident. If you think someone has obtained your password (most likely through a phishing scam that lured you to a site that looks like Facebook) that's the accident. Time to change.

Reclaim Your Account

It's possible whoever took over your account will have beaten you to changing the password. Fortunately, Facebook has a process for reclaiming accounts. Follow the steps in the Help Center, which will verify your identity and re-secure your account.

Update Your Security Software

Don't gamble that the Facebook problem will remain just a Facebook problem. Update your security software (or, if, God forbid, you're not using one, get a package immediately). To date, most of the major Facebook viruses and attacks have been limited to sending messages and friend requests, but that is likely change.

Trim The App Fat

Go through the list of apps you have installed on Facebook and cut any that you don't use regularly, and certainly any that with hindsight look suspicious. Each of your apps can compromise your security and privacy. Facebook has a primer on how to remove unwanted apps.

Tell Your Friends

Make sure you alert potentially vulnerable contacts as soon as you know your account has been compromised. It's also a good idea to let them know the steps you took to fix the account and, if you can figure it out, what worked.

Evernote: A 0-to-60 MPH Guide

Evernote is many things to many people because it's so powerful. But for the same reason, Evernote's purpose is vague enough that it can be hard to get started using it. First, you have to figure out what it can do for you. Here's a guide to how to think about Evernote, so you can get better at using it.

What Is Evernote?

Evernote is an application that lets you create notes that sync between all your devices. On your desktop, all your notes are files on your computer that can be easily found using the operating system's file management features. On touchscreen devices, Evernote's standalone app lets you view and edit all your notes as well as capture new ones using text, camera or microphone. It's also in the browser, letting you clip things from the Web straight into your notebooks.

Evernote has amazing search powers. Not only can it find notes that contain text, it uses optical character recognition on images, so you can just take pictures of text (receipts, signs, papers, anything), and Evernote will be able to find it for you.

The free version is already pretty powerful, but for $45.00 per year, you can upload up to 1GB per month, attach up to 50MB of just about anything to an individual note, you can go back in time and view past versions of notes, search inside PDFs and more. My favorite premium feature is offline notebooks. You can access and edit notes without an Internet connection, and any changes you make will sync when you're back online.

A 'note' in Evernote can be text only, or it can include photos, audio or other attachments. Notes come with some metadata like date and time, and mobile notes also grab your precise location. You can also add metadata like the URL from which you grabbed some bit of Web content or the author of the stuff you're saving.

Evernote allows for two levels of organization of individual notes. Notes can be grouped together inside notebooks, and notebooks can be combined into a stack.

There are also a couple of tricks. You can tag notes, which lets you create associations between notes within a notebook or in different notebooks. You can also save searches, which allows you to quickly find all notes containing multiple specific tags, or just the ones that contain a specific word or phrase.

And if the core capabilities of Evernote aren't enough for you, there are all kinds of applications built on top of it to extend the service.

So Evernote is clearly powerful. But what can you do with it?

Evernote Is Your Digital Desk Drawer

I learned to organize a computer's storage drive based on the metaphor of a 'desktop.' The digital desktop might be a foreign concept to kids who are born today, but it still applies. If the stuff on my computer is on my desktop, then Evernote is my desk drawers. It's the place I organize and stash stuff I need so it's out of the way but accessible any time.

That's still too vague. Here's what I really do with it.

First, I created an '@Inbox' notebook. I came up with this on my own, but I vastly improved the idea with a trick I learned from Brett Kelly's helpful e-book, Evernote Essentials: I added the @ glyph to the name. The @ symbol makes sure that the Inbox stays at the top of the notebooks in alphabetical order.

I set @Inbox as my default notebook, so when I send anything to Evernote and don't have the time to file it, it ends up in @Inbox. This is especially crucial for quick, mobile tasks. That way, I can make a note quickly and put my phone away, and when I'm back on the desktop, I can do the organizing later.

I have created seven stacks for categories of digital stuff broad enough to cover just about everything. If I need a miscellaneous notebook for something that doesn't fit, it goes in a stack called "Archive." In my desk metaphor, stacks are the drawers. Here are a couple examples to give you a sense of what constitutes a whole stack and what makes for a specific notebook.

My Notebook Stacks

'Archive' is a catch-all place for notes that need no other category, but I also use it for pure storage, as opposed to notes I'm changing and editing constantly.

I decided to use Evernote to archive all my Instagram photos as well as those I like. I think it's important to have this backup, because Instagram doesn't let you scroll all the way back in your likes history, and moreover, who knows how long Instagram will be around. Evernote shows thumbnails of images attached to notes, so this is a nice way to browse.

I recently set up IFTTT triggers to watch these two Instagram feeds and save my photos to Evernote automatically. There's a bug on IFTTT's side that causes these notes not to display thumbnails in Evernote, which is annoying, but IFTTT says it's working on fixing it.

'Clips' is a stack I use for articles I've written that I want to save for posterity. The Evernote Web Clipper is pretty great about preserving the exact formatting of a Web page in an Evernote note, so I grab the posts I want to save with that. Inside the 'Clips' stack, I have a notebook from every site I publish to, plus one for miscellaneous clips.

'Culture' is where I keep lists of books, images, movies and music I want to keep track of. I'm sure I'll add more notebooks to this stack as I think of more types of media. For the most part, the notes in here are names of individual books, films, albums or whatever that I need to visit or revisit.

'Home' is a big one. I keep track of my work and finance documents here, as well as errands, recipes and manuals, people (and Evernote Hello contacts), and other various domestic things. Since some sensitive information is kept here, I take advantage of Evernote's cool ability to encrypt highlighted text, so it asks for a password before anyone can view it. I passcode-lock sensitive PDFs before I put them in Evernote.

Finally, as I mentioned in my Uber-Geek's Guide to Reading Online, I use Evernote to archive the Web articles I want to keep around forever. The 'Library' stack contains notebooks named for the various genres of things I read. I clip articles to it in a variety of ways described in the guide. My hope is that this will let me read the digital writings I love long after their Web links break.

Tags & Saved Searches

I use tags sparingly. I don't want to get too lost in them. I have a couple of projects that need greater organization than the two layers Evernote provides. Basically, within one notebook, I need to mark some notes as to-do and some notes as done, so I use tags for that. Another good example is 'errands,' which I use for any note that contains a task I have to do, which can be in any category.

The rarest thing I need to do is save a search, but I do that sometimes. Right now, I'm preparing for Burning Man, so I saved the search for any note that is tagged Burning Man and errands, so I can quickly jump to only those tasks. When Burning Man is over, I'll delete that search.

Extend Evernote With Other Apps

The Evernote app is good enough for most general tasks, but there are many things to capture with Evernote that are much improved by a tailor-made interface. The best example is Evernote's own standalone moble app, Hello, which provides a quick and easy interface for remembering people you meet.

Hello guides you through entering some contact info and taking a quick picture, and then it creates a nicely formatted Evernote note in a notebook of your choice (I use one called 'People' in my 'Home' stack). These can even be linked to your phone's address book through the standalone Hello app.

But third-party developers have also built some excellent Evernote integrations. Read-later apps Pocket and Instapaper let you send articles straight into Evernote. On my iPhone, I use Drafts to jot down text notes in the fastest possible way, then send them to Evernote. I also use EverClip, an iPhone app that can run in the background and pack up anything you copy to your clipboard on your phone for easy sending to Evernote.

Why Use Evernote?

The reasons to use Evernote instead of other solutions are numerous, but there are two big ones. Evernote makes a point of building client applications for every device and platform it can. So if you get used to storing things in Evernote, you don't have to worry about switching hardware or operating systems.

But the most important reason I moved my stuff into Evernote is the company's ambition. Evernote wants to last 100 years, and you can see that in its priorities.

It sometimes seems to work harder on its back-end service and infrastructure than on making its apps better, but that's okay. In 20 years, I won't care what the Evernote iPad app was like, but I will certainly care that my notes still work and look the way I intended them to. Evernote is building forward compatibility with future platforms we haven't imagined.

Dropbox is great for cross-platform syncing, but you have to stack together your own collection of other applications for creating and editing documents in it. Google Drive has powerful Google Docs applications (on desktop and Android), and it has optical character recognition and image recognition in its search, but I don't trust that Google will build all those capabilities for every platform, and I don't want to be forced to use Android.

I think Evernote is the only service building exactly what I want: An outboard brain for digital information that's built to last.